1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a broadcast receiver. More particularly, the present inventions relates to a channel control method and apparatus of a broadcast reception system for facilitating channel selection by providing multiple broadcast channel images on a screen.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, television channel switching is made by means of a remote controller. The remote controller is a device for controlling an electronic apparatus and, recently, the remote control functionality may be integrated within a cellular phone or a cordless home phone. In the conventional remote controller, channel switching can be done in two ways: first, inputting a channel number by pressing numeral buttons directly, and second, navigating channels sequentially by pressing up/down (navigation) buttons. The reason why the remote control functionality can be readily integrated into a cellular phone or a cordless home phone is that these devices are equipped with numeral buttons, volume buttons, and navigation buttons that can be respectively used for direct channel selection, volume adjustment, and channel navigation.
Meanwhile, as the various broadcast services such as cable Television (TV), satellite TV, and Internet Protocol (IP) TV are popularized, a number of available broadcast channels may be increased up to more than 100 channels. If the number of a target channel is not known, the user might need to navigate all of the more than 100 channels in a worst case.
Because the channel zapping delay of a digital broadcast receiver is longer than that of an analog broadcast receiver and it can be difficult for the user to remember all of the channel numbers of content providers, the channel searching time for selecting the target channel is likely to increase as the number of channels increases, resulting in the user's inconvenience.
Therefore, a need exists for a channel control method and apparatus of a broadcast reception system for facilitating channel selection by providing multiple broadcast channel images on a screen.